BILL SWEETENHAM, the national performance director who was cleared last week of allegations of bullying, will turn his back on Britain with a quarter of a million pounds in his pocket today if he does not receive “the full backing of the board” of British Swimming at a meeting in Loughborough.
Amid calls for the entire board of British Swimming to resign should the Australian pack his bags, Sweetenham is said to be in no mood to be humble in the face of a report “short on facts, heavy on opinion and overwhelmingly supportive” of him.
While he would “dearly love to stay,” a source told The Times, he is ready to “quit if he feels unjustly treated or has his hands tied behind his back and a piece of tape strapped over his mouth when he knows he’s done nothing wrong and the report concludes that he hasn’t”.
Should he decide to go, it would not be a case of “back me or sack me”: under the terms of Sweetenham’s contract, short of the director being involved in criminality, British Swimming would have to pay up the Australian’s contract almost three years shy of a commitment for him to lead Britain to the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing.
In a statement on January 4, British Swimming announced that the independent inquiry into allegations contained in an article in The Times last August “broadly speaking . . . suggests allegations of bullying are not proven”. It left the matter far from being settled, however, by stating that there were “a number of issues” that Sweetenham had to face, the nature of which they would not disclose.
The Times now understands that those issues range from a call for him not to refer to women as “a group of Sheilas” — a suggestion that raises more than a titter Down Under — to a demand for him to “take criticism to heart, be more humble, show a little humility and go easy on his manner”.
Sweetenham refused to comment. However, buoyed by legal advice that an independent inquiry had “cleared him and would not stand up to legal scrutiny if anything else was suggested”, he was “unlikely to tolerate suggestions that he has done anything wrong”, the source said.
Asked if the director would seek unconditional backing, the source added: “Bill wants this meeting as much as the board does. I would say he wants to emerge with a clear, unequivocal statement of support, with no tents flapping in the wind and a peg nailed down hard at every corner. Bill compromises where he sees sense but he won’t be sitting in that meeting cowed.”
David Sparkes, chief executive of British Swimming, said yesterday that he was “not particularly expecting to put out a statement” after today’s meeting. He refused to pre-empt the meeting and would not discuss the issues to be raised at it today with Sweetenham and Bob James. James’s role is to represent a board that includes Chris Baillieu, the Olympic rowing silver medal-winner from 1976, and Guy Davis, husband of Barbara Cassani, who headed London’s Olympic 2012 bid before Lord Coe took over.
Calling the meeting “routine”, Sparkes said: “I have no outcome in mind. A lot will depend on how it goes. Bill has seen the report and I’ll be interested to hear what he feels about it and what lessons can be learnt. I see it as a productive meeting.”
Asked whether he and the board would consider their position should Sweetenham quit, he said: “I’ve no idea if it affects our position. There’s no plan B, C or D. If Bill felt he couldn’t carry on, we’d have to accept it. Swimming would go on without Sweetenham or Sparkes.”
The inquiry was called on September 21 last year, when the federation stated that “the allegations [of bullying] made in The Times are new to us within British Swimming”. In fact, one of those quoted in these columns in August 2005, Mark Foster, first made the allegations in an article in The Times almost a year before, on the eve of winning the world short-course title over 50 metres freestyle in October 2004.
A senior figure within the sport said: “This has been totally mismanaged. Some of the so-called bullying incidents took place in front of board members and parents. No one reported them as a problem because no one perceived the blunt delivery of uncomfortable truths to be out of the ordinary in world sport. It beggars belief that it came to this. If he [Sweetenham] goes, so should they [the board]. He’s said to have divided the sport, but it’s more like 95-5 [in his favour], certainly not 50-50.”
Foster maintains that Sweetenham has “damaged” British swimming but found himself at loggerheads with two Olympic medal-winners yesterday and one of those in line to run the sport in future. While Graeme Smith, the former 1,500 metres freestyle Olympic bronze medal-winner, described the director as “a bit of a pussy cat”, David Davies, the present freestyle Olympic bronze medal-winner at that distance, said that he was “a great leader” who had “sat me down and given me a right ear-bashing — but that’s what you need sometimes”.
A leading coach added: “What Mark and a few others fail to understand is that a lot of what they’re complaining about is not Bill’s decision.
“Bill is the architect of a successful system and his departure now would be a premature loss to the sport at a time when the changes being made are far from reaching maturity. Should he go, we will not alter course.”
